


To Follow Other Stars

by Ori_Cat



Category: Relic Master Series - Catherine Fisher
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 05:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11662239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat
Summary: From light-years away, the stars are different.





	To Follow Other Stars

It was a weird thing not to see them, Soren said. For there to be none of the familiar constellations she had memorized as a girl - no Scorpion or Swan in summer, no Hunter in winter, no Great Bear or Little Bear. Without the lights, it was true that there were so many more, but none of them were hers. 

Not long after they had arrived, she cornered everyone in Maar one mostly-free evening and pulled up a star map and showed everybody how to navigate using them. How to identify Polaris from the Great Bear and drop a line to the horizon for due north, how to identify the south pole from Crux and Alpha and Beta Centauri. She wasn’t sure if she should be proud that she knew this, or irritated that everybody else didn’t. It wasn’t complicated, after all. 

The world develops, and everyone learns about quantum physics and knows how to code computers, but nobody learns about the stars. 

She had always assumed she was going to miss her amateur astronomy, and so it was deeply annoying to find out that she did. It was strangely unsettling not to recognize anything and not to be able to match anything up to a star map, like she had done when she travelled to the south. She hadn’t totally trusted her memory on the Southern constellations. The Sekoi undoubtably had their own constellations made out of these strange stars, but she still wasn’t quite sure she wanted to ask, and without a star map she’d probably forget within ten minutes. For now it was just another thing to get used to, the unfamiliar sky. 

If she tried, she could almost pretend that the stars around magnetic north formed the shape of a bear. 

* * *

It was a weird thing to see them again, Tamar thought. For there to be none of the familiar constellations the Sekoi had kindly taught them - no Nightcat, no Dancer, no First House over the north, no equatorial Tree. 

They said that the First House was built by their progenitors when they first entered this world from somewhere below, and that the Tree was the sort that grew the soft blue-black fruits, and that the Nightcat had once been earthbound and living and belonged to one of their heroes. He wouldn’t have cared at all, cultures were never a thing that interested him, but when the Sekoi told stories it was impossible not to listen, and hard not to remember. 

You couldn’t see anything in the cities, of course. Just the moon and Sirius and maybe Rigil, and all those vanished if it was even the slightest bit misty in the stronger sky-glow. But if you drove out far enough, onto gravel roads linking fields and chunks of remaining woodland, until the sky-glow was relegated to just an orange haze behind the hills - out there, you could still identify constellations and asterisms. If you shut off the light, there were hundreds of visible stars. 

Just for the sake of it, he tried to find north. (South would have been useless; he was in the north hemisphere anyway.) Find the Big Dipper asterism, trace a line between the two pointer stars to the next star of similar brightness - Polaris - and drop a vertical line to the horizon. It matched up with the compass on his phone, at any rate. Soren would be proud, he thought dully. 

People said it was always the same sky. They meant it positively, to remind people that all the human race was one great family, to remind people that whatever their problems, they weren’t that great in the grand scheme of things because the sun and moon would still rise the next day, to remind people that they shouldn’t miss the world of their childhood so much because the stars hadn’t changed. It was always the same sky, everywhere in the world. 

It was always the same sky because it was sealed around them at the seams on the star-maps, and nobody could escape. It was always the same sky and it had been worn out by billions of human eyes. 

Pretty soon, he would have to drive back, unless he wanted to spend an entire night out in his car in the dark preserve. But he would hang onto his night vision for just five minutes longer. 

If he tried, he could almost pretend that the stars around Polaris formed the shape of a house.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Sweet Lowdown's "You Can Find The North", which is a pretty good song for the Makers.


End file.
